Author | Marcos MartínezJakarta, the Indonesian capital, is sinking. 10.1 million people lived in the city in 2017, and over 30 million in its metropolitan area. As a solution to combat the rising seal-levels due to climate change, the state plans to move the capital, according to the minister Bambang Brodjonegoro. But the sinking city is not just due to rising sea levels.Jakarta was built on swampy ground, making it unstable. The over-extraction of groundwater has also weakened the aquifers. We are all responsible for the last blow with climate change. According to some forecasts, the city will disappear by 2050 and these types of events could occur more often. Efficient water management is essential to combat climate change.
A dreadful water policy
As mentioned earlier, Jakarta is a city built on a swamp. It is not the only city to be built on water or the first to encounter problems resulting from this. The Aztecs in pre-Hispanic America drained the Texcoco Lake to build the city of Tenochtitlan around the 14th century; while Venice was built on around 120 islands in the 5th century. Today Mexico DF suffers worse earthquakes and Venice is sinking.If in Jakarta the final blow came with climate change, which is also threatening to do away with Venice’s heritage, as we will see later, in Mexico DF, the problem arose when, during the 16th century, the settlers drained Tenochtitlan. We now know that this is having a significant impact on earthquakes, with these increasing as a result of the clay sediments that were left behind.
When the ground moves, infrastructures collapse
But Jakarta, Mexico or Venice are not the only cities in the world whose foundations are suffering as a result of human activity. In a considerable part of Russia, Alaska, China and Canada, they are experiencing serious problems with basic infrastructures such as railway lines. Remember, the most efficient mass transit option. The problem occurs when the permafrost heats up.The permafrost is a type of soil in which the “active layer”, a layer four centimetres from the surface, remains frozen all year round. It is a fantastic material for building on given its stability, but global heating is making it melt. As the climate expert, Laurence C. Smith, stated in his book ‘The World in 2050’, “the substrate acquires the structural resistance of wet clay”.Railway lines cannot be built on clay. Nor homes, hospitals or schools. The Winnipeg-Churchill (Canada) train was affected back in 2010, when it had to reduce its speed for a number of kilometres. The Qinghai-Tibet railway line, on the Tibetan Plateau between Goldmud and Lhasa, was also affected. The same occurred between Baikal and Amur in Russia.
Cities that will sink in the Mediterranean
In 1953, the Netherlands suffered such destructive floods that in 1987 they built the Oosterscheldekering, an eight-kilometre-long barrier between the islands of Schouwen-Duiveland and Noord-Beveland, considered to be the world’s firstflood barrier. A plaster to combat climate change and a (slight) increase in resilience.In 2018, it became clear that all these measures were inefficient in the long term. The models indicate that the whole of the Netherlands is gradually sinking. In 1982, the Thames one was completed in London, but the city is heading the same way as the Netherlands. Shanghai, Houston, Bangkok and other cities “may seem strong and stable, but it is a mirage”, according to Kat Kramer, a contributor to the Christian Aid report which the BBC helped broadcast in 2018.